Google Is Destroying The Entertainment Industry

Over the last few years, there has been a rapid decline in the fortunes of newspapers, movie and recording studios, magazines, and book and record stores. A number of very notable businesses have declared bankruptcy, including the Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios (MGM). Many others are in severe financial trouble. How did so many major entertainment related businesses develop such severe financial problems in such a short amount of time? Although Google is not the only cause, it is a primary one. Google has attracted so much traffic , and made so much money, because helps hundreds of millions of users find pirated movies, songs, images. and computer software which they no longer have to pay for.

Although portions of Google have legitimate uses, much of Google (particularly Google Image Search) is simply a gigantic infringing website, which attracts enormous traffic by offering its hundreds of millions of users every imaginable copyrighted image for nothing. Google knows full well what works are infringing and who the bad actors are. Nevertheless, Google copies massive amounts of infringing content from their websites and does business with these bad actors. Google even accepts payments from known massive infringers of movies, songs, other copyrighted works to promote those thieves. It provides thousands of links to their websites, and places their ads both on google.com and on third-party websites. Despite the obvious illegality of such websites, Google will not end its business dealings with these sites, even after receiving numerous complaints regarding their massive infringement.

Google could remove virtually every copyrighted image from its offerings by using image recognition, but instead it feigns stupidity, claiming that it cannot figure out which images are infringing and which are not. Instead, Google places its ads next to billions of dollars of obviously pirated images, and earns hundreds of millions of dollars from such conduct, without paying the rights holders anything.

Google also places the names of Perfect 10 models (and others) under unrelated sexually explicit images, including images of women having sex with animals, thereby wrongly suggesting that Perfect 10 models are engaging in such horrific activities. In our experience, Google will not take action to end such defamation even after receiving notice. Our experience is that Google simply refuses to stop publishing information, no matter how personal, defamatory, or damaging it may be.

One example of Google’s arrogance and its brazen disregard for the rights of others is that Google is continuing to provide over 14 million links to the notorious infringing website thepiratebay.org, which was repeatedly condemned by foreign courts, and is continuing to copy more than 300,000 images from that known infringer for use in Google Image Search results. What more need we say!